I spent years telling my patients I had no interest in running a marathon. I had spent all of my public school years running cross-country, including some 10km races, and I’d like to think I was fairly decent at it. But once I started university and into my career, distance running stopped. I tried to get back into running a few times, but it never felt comfortable. After I moved to Ireland, I decided running was something I wanted to do again, but this time with a different approach. I didn’t set out to run a marathon; I just wanted running to feel good again.

When I started training for my 10km race almost a year ago, I decided to add some speed sessions to my training and really start to vary my sessions. This included long, slow distance (LSD), easy, tempo, interval, and recovery runs. I had dabbled in these different runs a bit when I ran cross country in high school, but last year it took a little bit of time to get a handle on them and truly appreciate their purpose. If you don’t, you end up in this weird middle ground where every run is tiring without the intended benefits.